Teaching and learning cultural humility online: Technology transfer from a (beloved) campus MPH course to the distance format

The 2001 Institute of Medicine Report “Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? Educating Public Health Professionals for the 21st Century” concluded that “cultural competency should be supported as an essential element in [public health] teaching, research, and practice”. The report recommended that “an active use of technological capability is needed to identify and rapidly disseminate cultural competency information and to integrate it into the core [public health] competency curriculum”. This presentation shares the experience of extending a well-loved, iconic, and seminal MPH course on multicultural communication from the traditional campus format (where it had been taught for over 15 years) to the dynamic and uncharted online environment of a new MPH distance education initiative. Distinctions are drawn between teaching and learning cultural competence and cultural humility; the fit and misfires of faculty assumptions about teaching multicultural communication in radically different learning environments, and the profoundly different experiences of exchange, vulnerability, and freedom of confident offered by each way of engaging with the material and each other. Data are drawn from course evaluations, weekly process observations, student work, and faculty reflection to bring forward the complexity and possibility of meeting the IOM's call to use technology to integrate cultural competency into core public health competency curriculum. Things that worked, things that didn't but we fixed or reinvented, and lessons learned are shared. Emphasis is on practical steps that can be applied to other academic, organizational, or community initiatives addressing technology transfer (both conceptual and methodological) for cultural competence in public health.